Tuesday, January 01, 2013

What reception will India give new Rusdhie film?

The film of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is set to be
released on 1 February. If the team behind the movie adaptation is at
all nervous about screening the film they have good reason. Rushdie, who
wrote the screenplay, and has been the literary face for freedom of
expression for years, has a tumultuous history of censorship with India.

The Booker prize-winning book is about two children, born at the
stroke of midnight as India gained its independence. Their lives become
intertwined with the life of this new country.
One of the figures in the book, The Widow, was based on former Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi. In the book, the character, through genocide and
several wars, helps destroy Midnight’s Children. Gandhi had imposed a
widely-criticised State of Emergency in India.

In an interesting turn of events, Gandhi threatened Rushdie libel
over a single line. That line suggested that Gandhi’s son Sanjay had
accused his mother of bringing about his father’s heart attack through
neglect. Rushdie settled out of court, and the single line was removed
from the book.

The real controversy that followed, the one that changed Rushdie’s life completely, came after the 1988 release of his book The Satanic Verses. While the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa
against Rushdie and called for his execution (citing the book as
blasphemous), the author saw many countries, including India, indulge in
their own brand of censorship.

As has been revealed in Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton, the author felt the Indian government banned his book without much scrutiny.
The Finance Ministry banned the book under section 11 of the Customs
Act, and in that order stated that this ban did not detract from the
literary and artistic merit of his work. Rushdie, appalled at the logic
penned a letter to the then prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, stating:

"Apparently, my book is not deemed blasphemous or objectionable in
itself, but is being proscribed for, so to speak, its own good… From
where I sit, Mr Gandhi, it looks very much as if your government has
become unable or unwilling to resist pressure from more or less any
extremist religious grouping; that, in short, it’s the fundamentalists
who now control the political agenda."

Rushdie was right, of course. Years later, in 2007, he attended the first Jaipur Literary Festival in India unnoticed.
Without any security or fuss, he arrived unannounced, mingling with the
crowd. Things had changed dramatically by 2012, when Rushdie’s arrival
to the now must-attend literary festival was much publicised, and
predictably attracted controversy.
Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani, vice-chancellor at India’s Muslim Deoband School, called for the government to cancel Rusdie’s visa for the event as he had annoyed the religious sentiments
of Muslims in the past. (Incidentally, Rushdie does not need a visa to
enter India as he holds a PIO — “Person of Indian Origin” — card.)

The controversy escalated quickly, with the organisers first
attempting to link Rushdie via video instead of having him physically
present, but then cancelling the arrangement when the Festival came under graver physical threat.
It was a sad day for freedom of expression in India, especially
considering the fact that many, including Rushdie felt these moves were
politically motivated because of upcoming elections in Uttar Pradesh,
where the Muslim vote is very important. The government vehemently denied these claims.

Liberals in India were shocked at the illiberal values that the
modern India state espoused, feigning to not be able to protect a writer
and a festival against the threats of protestors. Shoma Chaudhary of
Tehelka wrote:

"The trouble is nobody any longer knows what Rushdie was doing inThe
Satanic Verses: neither those who are offended by him, nor those who
defend him. Almost no one, including this writer, was given a chance to
read the book."

Later in the year, initial press reports around Midnight’s Children revealed that the film could not find a distributorin
India. The production team thought it might be a case of
self-censorship as the film featured a controversial portrayal of Indira
Gandhi. However, PVR Pictures, a major distributor in India, has plans
to release the film in the country in February 2013.

31 years after the Midnight’s Children hit the stands, and the same
year as he was bullied into cancelling a visit to a literary festival,
it seems Salman Rushdie will yet again challenge Indian society. It
remains to be seen if he will, yet again, become a pawn in the internal
politics of the country.

3 comments:

Great literature, unlike pulp, achieves greatness by engaging and shaping a readership’s conscience for the good. If it’s fun to read, all the better, and a fun read is all but impossible to turn into a fun watch.

Take Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’. Right from the point its narrator ‘tumble[s] forth’ into the world as the clock’s hands fold to 15 August 1947, just before his ancestral Kashmir—where doctors examine girls in purdah through armholes made in sheets—slips into crisis and into a ‘winter’s gestation in its eggshell of ice’, and a bit more before his ‘mutilated organ waggle[s] angrily’ on losing his foreskin, all the way to his discovery of voices in his head, his Widow nightmares and the regime’s sickening ‘snip-snip’ agenda (and worse), the novel ripples and rankles and rips and rants till it churns one’s conscience against dictatorship with a visceral vividity and whack of words that cinema cannot possibly convey. Which is why you won’t find me watching the film version.

Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’ is a perplexing case in contrast. For one, it is banned in India. For good reason? Who knows. Let’s face it, Indian law does restrict freedom of speech in cases that put harmony and lives at threat, as do many countries (shouting ‘fire’ in a closed hall is not allowed), and the MIM’s rabble-rouser Akbaruddin Owaisi has just—and justifiably—been arrested for a speech available at www.siasat.com that starts as a rant against injustice and then scrapes its way down the gutter; it not only belittles beliefs of India’s majority, but worse, appears to call at one point for a civil war (the more-than-merely-offensive ‘25 crore vs 100 crore’ part). By this yardstick, many other rabble-rousers deserve to be gagged by the law too (why be so selective?).

Does Rushdie? It’s not so clear. He has been utterly offensive in that novel, yes, and as Omair Ahmad argues in this article in OPEN magazine http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/art-culture/insulting-traditions he should have the balls to admit it (‘Mahound’…? C’mon, it’s not like desi types don’t get it), even if he’s within his rights to call a revered revolutionary names, one who’d arguably have considered his revolution a failure if he himself were to end up deified in any way. But Rushdie, notably, issues no threats of violence. Sure, the form that ‘Verses’ takes is definitely despicable from what little one can gather (not having read it), may even be considered ‘emotional violence’ (legally recognised in divorce cases), and it certainly does not have my endorsement (given my current knowledge). Yet, one may grant Rushdie this. His Averroesque intent may possibly have been benign. He may possibly have been trying to provoke, in a logical positivist turn that grievously misforeread the response, an exegetical rethink of stuff sacralised that’s conceivably human. [Pardon the gobbledygook!!]